Thursday, 31 August 2017

I recently shared with a colleague an idea that's been germinating in my head. He informed me that if I carried through the idea it would drive me insane. I pointed out that this was of course nonsense, as I'm already quite loco and have been since at least the mid-90s. But seriously. The idea is to do for ancient Israel and Judaism what Neil Ormerod has recently done for Christian history. Ormerod takes Lonergan's understanding of dialectic and a normative scale of values and uses it to sketch the dialectic development of Christianity. What emerges is not a detailed history, but rather an attempt at a "bird's eye" view of how social, cultural, and personal values have unfolded through the first two millennia of Christian history. Insofar as Ormerod starts in the first century, that is where I'd like to leave off. (I am of course quite aware that Jewish history continues well beyond that period, up to the present and presumably into the future, and the question of how to trace out Judaism and Christianity as parallel developments out of ancient Israelite and Jewish religion is an urgent one. It is however not my question, and not one for which I feel that I have or could reasonably develop the necessary expertise. I would of course be thrilled if my work aided those who do have that expertise and interest).

I'll give an example of the sort of narratives such a history might provide. If you look at Judges, there is a basic pattern. Israel follows after gods who are not YHWH, and consequently a new power oppresses them. Then God raises up a judge, and Israel throws off the oppressor's yoke. Now, certainly one should be very wary of treating this book as an exact account of what happened in Iron Age I Israel. But I would suggest that for the historian there is significant usable data in this basic schema. In Lonergan's understanding, as developed by Robert Doran, cultural values serve to both warrant and where necessary correct social values. Now, best we can tell, Israel at this time was a loose confederation of tribal groups that found its unity in common allegiance to the cult of YHWH. In Lonerganian terms, the confederation falls within the realm of social values, while the cult is that which warrants it. As such, when there is a tendency towards infidelity towards the cult of YHWH, there is a tendency for the confederation system to break down. Thus does Israel become less able to cope with would-be oppressors. The correction to such a situation lies with personal values, with the emergence of persons who have appropriated the necessary cultural values in such a way that they can correct their dysfunction and in turn that of the social values. These are schematized in Judges as exactly that: the judges. Deborah perhaps is the exemplar here, invoking the cult of YHWH to call Barak and in turn responsive tribes to action against Hazor. A breakdown in cultural values allowed a breakdown in social values, while a corrective force originated in personal values corrected for cultural and through them social ones. A fuller analysis would likely suggest that the original breakdown in cultural values was the consequence of, or at least correlated with, a breakdown in personal values, but this is a blog so we'll leave it there. The point is to begin thinking about the dynamic interaction of society, culture, and person, across the duration of Israelite and early Jewish history.

Wednesday, 30 August 2017

Many have been talking about the Nashville Statement today. For those unfamiliar with it, it was put together by the so-called "Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood"--i.e. a group of self-appointed evangelical Christian persons whose expertise in either human sexuality or Christian theology is less than evident--in order to define for all and sundry the nature of gender and sexuality. I will again deviate slightly from my normal focus upon Lonergan and scripture in order to provide some reflection upon the matter, for whatever such reflection might be worth.

Others have commented upon the view of sexuality evident in this statement. Myself, I'm going to focus upon the elephant dancing in the middle of the room. Evangelical Christianity historically has been predicated upon a radical understanding of the principle of sola scriptura, i.e. that (66 out of the 73 books that the majority of Christians consider to be in) the bible contains all that is sufficient for Christian doctrine. The fascinating thing is how little of these articles can be warranted from scripture alone. Indeed, as far as I know, there is nothing in scripture that speaks to trans-identity. Now, theologically one might be able to use material other than scripture to arrive at the conclusion that trans-identity is sinful (such an argument would have to articulated carefully, and with conscientious attention to its pastoral implications), but I do not reckon that you can get there from scripture alone. And this raises a question about the very existence of the Nashville Statement: if the bible contains all that is sufficient for Christian doctrine, then why is there any need for this document? Why do the signatories not think that the statement "Read the bible" would suffice?

An answer can be found, I suggest, in Lonergan, who argues that whereas Christian scripture aims to speak to undifferentiated consciousness, i.e. consciousness that is generalized rather than specialized, Christian dogma aims to speak to differentiated consciousness, specifically to consciousness primarily operating within the realm of the intellect. That is, scripture for the most part aims to move the whole person, whereas dogma aims to inform and persuade the intellect. As such, with this greater focus, the latter can achieve a clarity that the former often cannot. (The fruits of this distinction cannot be overstated. It might help explain why Paul, for instance, continues to boggle exegetes: because that which does not take the literary form of dogma is being treated as if it does). This is why, despite their stated abhorrence of creeds, virtually every fundamentalist group feels a need to put out a strongly-worded statement of faith. Quite simply, Christianity has developed to the point that such forms are necessary to clearly express its truths. In fact, it developed to that point by at least the fourth century. In the end, what the Nashville Statement perhaps reveals most profoundly is the intellectual crisis in certain forms of Christianity, which necessarily depend upon that which in principle they consider to be unnecessary.

Tuesday, 29 August 2017

In my previous post I suggested that the Moses narratives are grounded in an attempt to convey through cosmological myth the experiences provoked by Moses' person and operations. In order to do this, these narratives have to subvert such myth. The king, typically the exemplar of cosmic order, becomes the source of cosmic chaos as he subjugates the Israelites and resists YHWH's efforts to restore justice through Moses' work. Moses the murderer, a figure who should be seen as the profound bearer of injustice and disorder, becomes the agent of cosmic restoration to a just order. And in this subversion something remarkable happens: the foundations of a break with the very cosmological myth in which the Moses narratives are grounded.

One of the recurring problems in the social sciences is how to simultaneously account for how society and culture maintain integrity over generations and yet are constantly changing. How is American society and culture, for instance, recognizably American society and culture at any given point in American history, yet American society and culture at any two given points in American history might be radically different? In order to account for such a phenomenon, one must have some notion of a dialectic. There must be opposed principles at work within the given society or culture, the recurrent interplay of which constitutes continuity while generating change. In the Lonergan tradition, when it comes to culture it has been argued that one might generalize these principles as cosmology and anthropology: the difference between society understood as something grounded in the natural order and society understood as something grounded in human experience. What happened in the exodus, I would argue, was a significant break-through for the anthropological principle, with the human experience of suffering and need for freedom achieving ascendance over Pharaonic social cosmology.

This anthropological principle will recur throughout the Israelite and Jewish tradition. It is what we hear in the prophets, when they call out the wealthy for exploiting the poor, when Micah declares that YHWH seeks mercy and justice and humility, not sacrifices. It is what we hear in Jesus, when he says that the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath, in Paul when he says that without love we are nothing. It is what we hear when the Pharisee Hillel says that the essence of Torah is that one should not do to others what is hateful to oneself. And while this anthropological principle surely did not originate with Moses (no doubt it had its origins in values held by the transhumant groups from which the Israelites originated; indeed, the very decision to opt for transhumance likely represents in part an anthropologically-driven desire to be free of control by what Voegelin describes as "cosmological empires"), certainly it was never the same after him.

Sunday, 27 August 2017

Think about the great persons of our times. Think of, for instance, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Malcolm X. These are persons whose characters are experienced as being fundamentally different than those of other persons. They are felt as somehow transcending the ordinary limits of human possibility. When we want to express this experience, we turn to narrative. We tell stories about their great deeds, how they defied sheriffs and governors and other hostile folk who sought to destroy them and their people. We speak with awe about King sitting in Birmingham jail, a prisoner of conscience, or Malcolm X's courage in breaking with the Nation of Islam in favour of a moderate orthodox form of his religion, one that he came to recognize more fully affirmed the humanity of all persons. We tell these stories, which find a complement in the resources of modern historiography and the social sciences to provide analytical depth.

But imagine if we didn't have those resources. Imagine if virtually all we had was cosmological myth, i.e. narratives that seek to explain the reality of an ordered cosmos, one in which the sun rises and sets everyday, in which every year days grew intermittently longer and shorter as seasons change and crops are sowed and harvested, one in which the moon travels around the earth twelves times in approximately the time it takes for the seasons to complete their annual cycle. And when such cosmological myths constitute our only real way of accounting for order, they also become how we account for social order. The state is imagined as being as much part of the cosmic order as anything else. The same gods operating within the rounds of the sun or the moon or the Nile are the gods operating through kings. How do we describe someone like a Martin Luther King, Jr., or a Malcolm X, who comes along and disrupts the social order? How does one talk about a man who defies a king when kings are immanently part of the cosmos?

The answer, of course, is simple: you use the imagery of cosmological myth. But of course you must do so in ways that subvert that imagery. Historically, sheriffs were seen as exemplars of law and order. The Martin Luther King, Jr., cycle subverts that, recasting sheriffs as the source of injustice and violence and the "criminal" MLK as the one restoring order through adherence to a higher law. Likewise Exodus recasts Pharaoh, the exemplar of ancient Egyptian law and order, and the murderer Moses, as respectively destroyer and restorer of just order. Pharaoh destroys just order when he subjugates the Israelites to slavery. Moses' story as an adult begins when he commits a murder and must flee, but the murderer returns to restore just order by leading the captives to freedom. Suddenly the story of the plagues makes perfect sense. How, in a world of cosmological myth, do you dramatize the disorder that has distorted Pharaonic reality but by showing how continued refusals to act justly cause the cosmos itself to turn against Egypt? The Mosaic birth narrative also now makes perfect sense. How, in a world of cosmological myth, do you dramatize the imminent restoration of just order better but by showing how the entire cosmos--natural and social--conspired to save the human agent of that restoration from the very injustices that he must later confront? And of course the man who restores just order must also be the one who delivers a just law, and indeed any departure from the Egyptian cosmos would have necessitated a new conceptual basis for social order. Moses as prodigy, Moses as plague-bearer, Moses as law-giver: this connection of symbolizations makes eminent sense as an effort to explain the unexpected, for in a world of cosmological myth one must account for the unexpected through cosmological myth. Moses was the unexpected.

All the above explanations disappear without a historical Moses. Without the experiential core of a historical Moses, the biblical accounts of the exodus simply become the senseless agglomeration of disparate mythical images from a myriad of sources. Of course, Moses has become mythologized, and that because there was no other imagery by which to communicate the experiences that his operations generated.When all you have is cosmological myth, you communicate by cosmological myth.

Friday, 25 August 2017

The previous three parts that I wrote upon the exodus have ended up garnering more attention than I expected, with people asking if I was intending to write any more on the matter. So, I thought I'd write an originally unplanned fourth part, focusing upon bringing out more explicitly the Lonerganian underpinnings of what went before.

The first of these underpinnings has to do with what it means to know. As noted previously, for Lonergan knowing is not like looking. The answers are not given in the data. Rather, one infers the answers from the data. One does this by first attending to the relevant data, which in our case would consist of the biblical accounts of the exodus, the place of Moses and the exodus in Israelite and subsequent tradition, our knowledge of slavery in New Kingdom Egypt, our knowledge of Late Bronze Age southern Canaanites, other ancient Near Eastern material such as that relating to the Hyksos, etc. Few people are specialists in all of this material (and in fact I'm a specialist in none of it), so one must generally rely upon the work of specialists in these different areas. That in turn demands a degree of trust in and thus goodwill towards others (and thus we see that the conversion to love that Lonergan describes as "religious conversion" is--while perhaps not strictly necessary for the historian to carry out her or his work--a significant boon, for love excludes the paranoia that undercuts the trust and goodwill necessary for successful historiography). Attending to these various data, one then strives to understand the ancient world. One considers the various explanations that one might offer for the totality of the data. Then, one considers the conditions that must be present in the data before one can affirm any given hypothesis. Insofar as those conditions are met, one can reasonably affirm the hypothesis, and insofar as those conditions are not met one cannot. Ideally by this point one finds that one and only one hypothesis satisfies all necessary conditions for its affirmation, but when one finds a plurality of such hypotheses one must take on the harder work of adjudicating between possibilities.

The second underpinning has to do with the notion of the level of our time, to which the title "Exodus in Our Time" alludes. This was a favourite phrase of Lonergan's, and has come in some senses to sum up the entirety of his project. The idea of the level of our time is built upon the recognition that insights lead to further insights and that this process extends trans-generationally in time. We today discover that A is true. This leads our successors to discover that B is the case. This leads their successors to discover that C is the case. Eventually, after hundreds or thousands of years Z is discovered to be the case, even though by this point Z might evince little to no obvious relation to A. Such is my argument regarding the world-historical significance of the exodus. I would argue that the insight into human dignity implicit in the phrase "Let my people go!" became the genesis of a long, extended, process of insight building upon insight that has eventuated in our modern understandings of human rights and freedoms (and presumably will continue to make its presence felt for some time yet to come; we, after all, are not the telos of history). No, the exodus is not predicated upon such modern understandings. No, such modern understandings are absent from the balance of the biblical corpus, Jewish and Christian (the writers of these texts were not, after all, moderns). But, absent the exodus and absent the experiences that generated and are transmitted by these scriptures, we would not have arrived at our modern understandings of human rights (or, if we did, the path getting here would have looked quite different).

There is a reason then that the phrase "Let my people go!" has such resonance with us. It represents an insight foundational to what we as a species are becoming. The historian's joyous privilege is to investigate more closely the origin and impact of this insight.

Wednesday, 23 August 2017

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each in its own way claims to be the legitimate heir of the religion of ancient Israel. While we often point to Abraham as the figure that links them, thus the term "Abrahamic" religions, in at least Judaism and Christianity the figure of Moses looms much larger. The entirety of Jewish religious life is organized around remaining faithful to God's law, as communicated to Moses at Mount Sinai, and Christian understandings of the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth are steeped in imagery associated with the exodus (after all, the Passover is precisely a commemoration of that event). In many ways, "Mosaic" would be a more appropriate description of Jewish and Christian religion than "Abrahamic." And thus can it reasonably be said that the core of the western religious tradition derives from the successful flight of enslaved persons from Egypt. At the fountainheads of western civilization--that remarkable fusion of Hebraic and Greek experiences--stand escaped slaves.

This has two obvious consequences. The first is that any effort to use the Jewish or Christian traditions to defend slavery ultimately must come up against the reality that such defense betrays the foundational impulse of these traditions. This first consequence has a further consequence: efforts to use these same traditions to support racism must up against that same reality. At its core, the exodus is a radical affirmation of human dignity, one that states that all persons, Egyptian or Hebrew, high-born or low, all deserve the freedom to live free from bondage and abuse. More, it introduces into history an insight that as far as I know was never previously so realized, namely that freedom is a sort of force in its own right. In the words of Ambassador G'Kar of Babylon 5: "There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand." This is not obviated because we see later biblical texts that suppose slavery as a given. All that reality says is that the radical affirmation of human dignity that is the exodus had not yet fully penetrated human moral imagination.

The second obvious consequence is that unreasonable denial of the exodus vitiates this radical core at the heart of the western religious tradition. And this has real consequences. When one apprehends that Christian religion in a very real sense can trace its origins back to a group of Semitic slaves flying to freedom, the white supremacists chanting anti-Semitic slogans in defense of monuments to slavery while wielding symbols of the Christian faith are revealed not simply as trollish haters but in fact deeply idiotic persons who do not even apprehend the very civilization they claim to defend. Add in that this seminal event happened not in northern Europe but rather in Africa, and they begin to look utterly foolish, even more than their home-made shields and bizarrely neurotic need to wear bicycle helmets and wield bargain tiki torches already have made them. Of course, such considerations cannot be used to adjudicate whether or not there was an exodus or a Moses, but given that the arguments against the historicity of either are hardly as strong as often assumed--in fact, they largely boil down to arguments from silence and the fallacious supposition that if the Israelites were of Canannite extraction they must have always dwelt in Canaan--then one wonders why, in the face of rising hate and renewed efforts to justify the past enslavement of entire human populations, we are not working more diligently to retrieve this vital core of the western tradition. We who are inheritors of the Jewish, Christian, and post-Christian secular traditions cannot fully become ourselves if we do not acknowledge fully the seminal debt that we owe to the wisdom and courage of slaves.

Monday, 21 August 2017

If there is one thing I've learned during my years in the academy, it's the importance of the questions that we ask. The old saw--"Have you stopped beating your wife?"--makes this point clearly. The question, as formulated, permits as answers only "Yes," "No," or "Maybe." If the person queried says "Yes," then she or he has confessed to spousal abuse. If the person queried says "No," then she or he has confessed to spousal abuse. If the person queried says "Maybe," then she or he has confessed to spousal abuse. The form of the question excludes the answer "I have never beat my wife," and thus the person queried can only defend his or her self from charges of spousal abuse by refusing to answer the question as formulated. Likewise, when we turn to the stories about Moses and the exodus and ask "Are these stories true?", the form of the question permits only "Yes," "No," or "Maybe." Faced with such a question, we find ourselves in a historiographical hell of our own creation, as it leads to such fruitless questions as "How much must we judge as 'True' before we can judge the whole as true?" and "How much can be false before we judge the whole thing as false?" The fundamentalist and the counter-fundamentalist agree in saying "All must true or none is true," which has the necessary corollary "If anything is false all is false." But this of course is nonsense. If I utter ten propositions nine of which are true, these are not suddenly falsified because the tenth is false. The answer that converts "Maybe" into "In part" is an advance, as it allows us to say "This story is in part true," yet it still suffers from the same antecedent cognitional limitation that the afflicts the question. Put otherwise, we are dealing with a question mal posée.

We can see readily why this is the case when we recognize Lonergan's distinction between intelligence and reason. Intelligence seeks to understand. Towards that end, it asks questions that cannot be answered by "Yes," "No," or "Maybe." With regard to Moses and the exodus, it might ask questions such as Why do Moses and the exodus loom so large in the Israelite tradition?, and Why do we find such ready resonances between the Joseph and Moses cycles on the one hand and on the other material from the ancient Near East of the second millennium BCE? We might break these down into further questions. Why is Moses presented in this way? Why is he given this name, this origin? Why is he assigned the role of liberator? of seminal law-giver? What is the relationship, if any, between the accounts and realities of the exodus and that of the Hyksos? between that of Moses and Akhenaten? Etc? Once one advances a hypothesis on the matter, which is to say a comprehensive answer to these questions, then, and only then, can one ask whether it is true. This is the work of reason, which being concerned with rendering judgment does ask the "Yes" or "No" question, not regarding the truth of our sources but rather the truth of our hypotheses. Put otherwise, the origin of the question mal posée--"Are these stories true?"--is the failure to distinguish data, which intelligence works to understand, from hypothesis, which reason works to judge.

The failure to distinguish data from hypothesis is grounded in the antecedent myth that knowing is like looking, that objectivity is seeing what is there to be seen and not seeing what is not to be seen. And this myth seems to be the ultimate basis for most skepticism regarding the existence of Moses or the occurrence of the exodus (as well, I'd argue, for the existence of Jesus of Nazareth). Someone working from this myth might reason as follows: we have virtually nothing contemporary to the event, nothing that we can look at and say "Aha! This comes from the exodus! Now we know that it happened," and thus we must conclude that it did not. This of course is the etiology of a certain contemporary bias towards archaeological data, a frequent hobgoblin in this discussion (without artifacts of Moses and the exodus, we are told, we cannot say that Moses or the exodus happened): if knowing is like looking then surely that which I can behold with my own eyes is better known than that which I cannot, and indeed, if pressed strongly enough, absent such material to behold we must either reserve judgment or judge in the negative. But knowing is not like looking. It is inferential, and proceeds by asking the sort of questions enumerated above, most basically those about the relationship between the Moses and exodus accounts on the one hand and the broader Israelite tradition and ancient Near Eastern material on the other.

I am firmly persuaded that the evidence is such that we are significantly more justified in concluding that there was a Moses, that quite simply this conclusion provides better grounds for answering the above questions than does the negative judgment that they do not. The nature of the evidence is such that we are probably limited in what we can say about him. While it probably over-states the evidence to suggest that he was of Egyptian rather than southern Canaanite (and perhaps specifically Hebrew or Israelite) extraction, his name and the narrative regarding his upbringing would tend to point towards some degree of "Egyptianization." He seems to have at some point been instrumental in leading a sizable group of (predominantly but perhaps not exclusively) southern Canaanite slaves from bondage in the eastern Nile delta region, and these actions secured for him a place of privilege in the Israelite and later Jewish and Christian traditions. It is precisely that place of privilege that most compels me to judge it probable that he existed and played a foundational role in Israelite history. When we see such waves rippling in the water we look for the stone that caused them, and I have yet to see a better stone proposed for these particular ripples than Moses himself.

Friday, 18 August 2017

A few years back, I attended a doctoral defense wherein one of the examiner's asked the candidate if a particular distinction that she had made in her thesis was academic. I remember being struck by the remarkable impropriety of the question, if taken literally: an academic, employed by and sitting in the the academy, was critiquing an aspiring academic for being academic. But such a query raises a subsequent one: what questions matter, and why? It's with that in mind that I want to think about historical doubts regarding the existence of Moses and the occurrence of an Israelite exodus from Egypt. The reason that that should matter now should be obvious: given the current struggles over the legacy of slavery in our time, it is a question of some material relevance whether or not the single most defining event of the biblical tradition common to both Judaism and Christianity, and to a lesser extent Islam, was in fact the successful escape of thousands of slaves from captive labour. If the Israelites were never enslaved in Egypt nor escaped that slavery, that has potentially significant impact for the many persons who hang their hopes for freedom and a better life for themselves and their descendants upon this event. Given the significance of the matter, this will be a three-part post: here, I will address the ancient data, in a subsequent post the grounds for negative judgment regarding the existence of Moses and occurrence of the exodus, and in a third the cultural import of this entire discussion.

It is often stated today that there is "no evidence" for the exodus, by which is usually meant "no extra-biblical evidence." And certainly there is a degree of truth in that: there is no clear, direct data outside the biblical tradition for the exodus. But that argument seems hardly sufficient to merit the conclusion that the exodus did not occur. This is an argument from silence, and arguments from silence tend to be among the weakest that one will find in historical thought. The question with any such argument is always "Should we expect such data?" In this case, "Should we expect extra-biblical evidence of the exodus?" Precisely to the extent that we cannot answer "Yes" with confidence, to that extent the argument from silence is unsound. In this case, confidence does not seem high. Israel was hardly a particularly significant actor in the ancient Near East. Why its departure from Egypt should be noted is not clear. It is equally unclear why the Egyptians themselves should be expected to have recorded what, if we take the biblical literature at face value, would have constituted such an ignominious moment in their history. It is noted that no archaeological remains of the exodus have been found, but that forces us to consider what we should expect to find in the archaeological record. This tends to be left under-addressed in such discussions. We do, after all, know that persons with southern Canaanite connections were present in the southern Sinai--the route of the exodus, as described in the biblical account--during the Late Bronze Age. Yes, many of these persons seem to have been employed in mining operations, but their presence raises possibilities that a group of southern Canaanite slaves escaped from Egypt might well have had access to networks of support in the southern Sinai (indeed, the biblical text intimates that this group had such access throughout the Sinai and the Negev, perhaps not surprising given the transhumant heritage of the Canaanite peoples, the early Israelites included).

It is sometimes argued that the fact that the early Israelites were of Canaanite extraction furnishes evidence against the exodus. If they were Canaanites, the argument goes, they must have always lived in Canaan. This is highly dubious. As noted above, we know that ancient Canaanites existed outside of Canaan. We have abundant evidence of significant Canaanite populations in the eastern delta region of Egypt during the mid-second millennium, exactly where and when the biblical tradition locates the Israelites. And the interaction between the eastern delta region and Canaan raises a fascinating set of questions, because although we do not have Egyptian accounts of a figure named Moses or of something that looks particularly close to the exodus, we do have Egyptian accounts of peoples (whom they named the "Hyksos") who likely 1) came from Canaan; 2) dwelt in the eastern delta; 3) rose to great power in this region, so much so that they were responsible for bringing the Middle Kingdom to an end; 4) were defeated by Egyptian kings; and 5) left the region in significant numbers to return to Canaan. Compare this with the Joseph and exodus cycle, where we have a people who 1) came from Canaan; 2) dwelt in the eastern delta region; 3) rose to great influence in this region; 4) were enslaved by Egyptian kings; and 5) left the region in significant numbers to return to Canaan. Moreover, Pi-Ramesses, one of the cities in which the Israelites are said to have laboured, very likely sat at the site of Avaris, the Hyksos' capital. I am not suggesting that the Israelites should be identified with the Hyksos, certainly not in a hard sense (although I do not think it inconceivable to consider that the Israelites entered Egypt among the peoples known as the Hyksos, which appears to have been largely a covering term to describe a variety of groups and are often conceived in modern scholarship as having slowly infiltrated rather than invaded the delta). I am suggesting that the fact that both Egypt and Israel preserve memories regarding the rise and fall of southern Canaanite influence in the eastern delta, followed by a flight back to southern Canaan, seems to defy the likelihood of mere coincidence, and perhaps undercuts the argument that we have no extra-biblical evidence relevant to the exodus.

Thus far the relevant data. In my next post, I will consider more fully the grounds for negative judgment regarding the existence of Moses and occurrence of the exodus.

Tuesday, 15 August 2017

Okay, four posts in a row relating to the events that recently took place in Charlottesville, thus very much breaking my own policy regarding the focus of this blog. But it seems to me, the more that I reflect upon it, that these are the times that try intellectual traditions. Whether the tradition takes its cues from Lonergan or Marx or Freud or..., it is at times like these that the tradition in question reveals the extent to which it is up to the task not only of making sense of our world but also of providing intellectual grounds by which to engage with and change the world. For although we cannot think our way out of the situation in which we find ourselves, neither can we expect that a failure to think will do us much good.

Towards the above end, I will in this post think about a distinction drawn in Robert Doran's remarkable development of Lonergan's thought, Theology and the Dialectics of History. He distinguishes between two dialectics: that of contraries on the one hand, and contradictories on the other. "Contraries," he writes, "are reconcilable in a higher synthesis, while contradictories are not." In short, contraries are both/and, while contradictories are either/or. With dialectics of contraries, human flourishing is advanced through a creative tension between a limiting (or integrating) pole and a transcendent (or operating) one. The integrator holds together the dialectic as an integral unity, while the operator moves the dialectic towards new possibilities. So, for instance, one might conceive society as integrating by spontaneous intersubjectivity, i.e. the way that we naturally and unreflectively interact with one another, while it is moved forward by practical intelligence seeking to alter those interactions towards desirable ends. Fail to recognize the reality of spontaneous intersubjectivity and our efforts to transform society collapse as we do not adequately attend to the range of viable social possibilities. Fail to recognize the necessity of practical intelligence and harmful intersubjectivities are allowed to become or remain the norm. Put more abstractly, one cannot hope to achieve social revolution overnight, but neither can one expect that the world can or should remain unchanged.

But the more urgent matter for us to consider at this point in our history, I think, is the dialectic of contradictories, the exemplar of which Doran identifies as the dialectic between good and evil. When faced with such a dialectic, one must opt for one pole or the other, because between them there is not creative tension but rather destructive antithesis. In our situation, one either affirms the full humanity of all persons, regardless of skin colour, or one does not. One cannot compromise on this. One cannot say "Well, I see that you affirm the full humanity of persons of colour while that guy over there denies that they have any humanity, so we'll split the difference at half-an-humanity." Well, one can say it, but in so doing one has chosen to stand with the racists. One, quite simply, has sided with evil.

Of course, the above is heuristic. It sketches out how things should be in order to begin thinking about why reality so often falls short. In reality, choosing to affirm the full humanity of all persons does not mean that there won't necessarily be situations in which one finds that one's existing beliefs or practices functionally deny that full humanity. It does mean that one becomes increasingly alert to that possibility, and when faced with it as a reality one alters one's beliefs and practices so as to affirm the full humanity of all persons. Making the right choice does not make one perfect, but it does put one on the road to righteousness.

Sunday, 13 August 2017

I'm violating my own policy here by a third consecutive post on contemporary politics, but as I reflect upon our current situation I cannot help but feel that with the Charlottesville riot (interesting how that word is avoided) perhaps we've crossed some sort of Rubicon. Every generation, it seems, faces a defining moment, a "Nothing will be the same after this" moment. Sometimes they are obvious: the assassination of JFK, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the events of 9/11. Sometimes they are perhaps less obvious, and that might be the case with Charlottesville. But just as 9/11 forced the world to confront the reality of terrorism enabled by a distorted Islam, so is Charlottesville forcing at least the US to face the reality of terrorism enabled by a distorted Christianity. And like it or not, that is precisely what is happening here. Since 9/11, we've lived in fear of a distorted Islam enabled by Muslim-ish leaders who represent something very far from the best of the tradition. Now, we have to live in fear of a distorted Christianity enabled by Christian-ish leaders who represent something very far from the best of the tradition. This is the distorted Christianity of the George Wallaces, the Jerry Falwells, the Franklin Grahams: a Christianity that rose to prominence through the effort to maintain segregation, that cynically exploited the AIDS epidemic in order to depict LGBT persons in the harshest possible terms, that abetted the raise of virulent xenophobia in the post-9/11 era, and that now is quite happily getting in bed with the so-called "Alt-Right." It is to Christianity as Al-Qaeda is to Islam.

It's in this context that I find myself increasingly persuaded of Lonergan's wisdom in placing such emphasis in his understanding of human flourishing upon religious conversion. As I've mentioned in this space before, religious conversion for Lonergan is the conversion to ultimate meaning. It entails grounding one's being not in parochial group interests or narcissistic individualism but rather in something that allows one to see all of humanity, and increasingly all of the cosmos, as valuable and beautiful. In a word, it is conversion to love. It is what distinguishes between distorted religiosity and authentic religiosity, and thus why it can be described as religious conversion. Distorted Islam, distorted Christianity, are distorted precisely due to the absence of this religious conversion. It is the inability of these "Christian" leaders to love--to truly love, in a way that touches and lightens the soul--that drives their hatred and fear of others. Being so far from the best that humanity can be, they suppose that the values of everyone around them are equally decrepit. When you are the worst, you assume the worst.

With the assistance of David Bowie, Queen reminded us that although love is such an old-fashioned word it is still the one thing that makes all the difference. As we live through a season of hate, the necessity of love is all the more evident. If we are to oppose hate we must rediscover love as a civic virtue. In fact, that seems to be the real dividing line today. Not between Right and Left, or between Christian and Muslim, or between religious and irreligious, but rather between love and hate. Those who have been converted to love, whether Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or Jewish or atheist, whether female or male, trans or cis, gay or straight, will stand strong on one side, while those who have not will stand shrieking on the other. And I do believe that in the end the gentle strength of love will win over the violent weakness of hate.

I've long dreaded what will happen when the Greatest Generation, with its wealth of experience, passes away. And we are fast reaching that point. The last veteran of World War One passed away in 2012, ninety-four years after that conflict ended (the last veteran who saw actual combat died a couple years earlier). Taking that as a measure, the last World War Two veteran should pass away around 2039. The last Holocaust survivor will probably pass away a few years later, as these included children. But we have already reached the point when these women and men are no longer active members of civil society. Towards the end of the war Germany was forcing boys in their young teens into uniform; a boy of thirteen in 1945 would today be eighty-five, likely saw little to no action, and probably retired from his post-war career a couple decades ago. Older veterans--such as my grandfather, who served from '39 through '45--would be well into their nineties (my grandfather volunteered in '39. If he was still alive, would have turned ninety-five this year). A lone Dunkirk survivor showed up, in uniform, at a screening of Nolan's Dunkirk, and made international headlines; he was ninety-two. Again, we have Holocaust survivors who are a bit younger, but still into their seventies and eighties (and those with the strongest memories of that time will of course be towards the upper end of that range; a survivor who was three years old in 1945 would have a valuable story to tell, and we would do well to listen, but it would differ qualitatively from that of a survivor who was fifteen. But even that three-year-old would turn seventy-five this year). In many ways, the Greatest Generation's collective wisdom has already in large part disappeared from public life. At the very least, it's nowhere as prominent as it was when these women and men were in their prime. I am just old enough to have had schoolteachers who lived through those years. No one much younger than me could say the same.

This weekend brought home very strongly what a loss this truly is. Persons present in Charlottesville report that the majority of the Nazi losers who gathered there were Millennials. One friend who was there estimated that persons in that age range accounted for about 90% of the white supremacists who showed up. These are the great-grandchildren of the Greatest Generation, some probably the great-great-grandchildren. And I think that significant. I don't know about anyone else, but I can say that I know my parents and their lives very well (if forced, I could probably tell you almost down to the month what city or town my parents lived in), my grandparents and their lives reasonably well (I can certainly give you the broad outlines of at least what countries they lived in and when), but my great-grandparents and their lives barely at all. In fact, of my eight great-grandparents, I have memories of meeting just one, my mother's maternal grandfather, and really when I think about him all I can recall is a visual image of his face. I know nothing about my great-great-grandparents. And that for the most part is what the Greatest Generation is to the Millennials: people they can barely remember if they met them at all. No wonder such persons do not share my deep, instinctual horror of Nazism. They did not grow up surrounded by the women and men who suffered most from those years, who fought and lost in the struggle to stop the terror.

It is with this experience that I think about a particularly fruitless debate in recent historical Jesus scholarship, regarding how well eyewitnesses remember things. This debate is fruitless in that it rather misses the point of history. The debate views history as a game of Chinese Whispers, wherein the transmission of eyewitness experience is a matter of transcription. The historian's job, under such an understanding, is to identify transcription error in the transmitted information. But of course that's not how it works. When my grandfather would tell me stories about the war, he wasn't just relaying factual information. He was relaying an experience, or really an entire Gestalt of experiences. He was relaying his fears and his convictions about the matter. And frankly, when thought of from that perspective, does it matter if he made small errors, or if I did? I remember him talking about watching tanks burn at the Battle of Monte Cassino. What if that experience actually took place at the Battle of Anzio, and either he or I remember it wrong? Would that make a difference to how I understand the sheer horror that he communicated to me, about his realization that the crews were trapped inside, burning to death? I remember him talking about how my great aunt's first husband died thirty minutes after first seeing combat. What difference would it make if he was killed after forty-five minutes, or twenty-four hours, or three days? I remember being told that he was killed in the Netherlands. But what if it happened in Belgium? What difference would that make? The central point remains: my grandfather had at that point been in and out of combat for years, and he couldn't get over the unfairness that someone he knew lasted so little time in the war zone. And that survivor's guilt is not a fact subject to transcription error, nor is the message that fascism and hate are awful because fascism and hate are exactly why he and so many of his generation had to suffer through such horrors.

This is one thing that I think that the scholars who work on social memory in the gospels have gotten very right: what matters most is the experience that is communicated, not the minutiae thereof. Of course, the details do matter. For instance, there have been persons who have claimed to be Holocaust survivors, who cynically even sought to profit off of such claims, but whose claims were shown to be false precisely because of the minutiae. That's an altogether different matter. It is an invaluable contribution. It is nothing less than the discernment of truth from error. Equally invaluable is the work of those historians who seek to calculate just how many were killed in the camps, or how the Nazis actually, concretely carried out their genocidal scheme. But none of that can be permitted to obscure the real importance of listening to persons who lived through those times, nor of preserving and passing on their stories. The real importance lies in the dramatic reality of human experience that they sought to convey, the horror and destructiveness of hatred and warfare. Likewise, the gospels seek to communicate a particular set of human experiences, all of which converge on those of Jesus's earthly followers, namely the experience of Jesus himself. These were experiences that changed them, and that change compelled them to change the world. And if history is to be anything more than pain-loving antiquarianism, it is to such experiences that we must attend.

Saturday, 12 August 2017

I try to keep this space free of politics, as much I can, but as I watch the images coming out of Charlottesville today I just can't. I'm also currently planning a course on Religion, Violence, and Peace for the fall, which due to current events has become increasingly about the euphemistically named "Alt-Right" (there are other words by which I might more accurately describe such trouble-makers, but neither this blog nor the classroom is a space for such language). As someone who works on Lonergan and scripture, I am naturally thinking through these matters from a Lonergan perspective, and so I'll make some suggestions from that perspective about how one might think about what we see coming out of Virginia today.

Lonergan has a four-fold imperative: Be Attentive. Be Intelligent. Be Reasonable. Be Responsible. Let us take the question: are white persons systematically disadvantaged in the US simply for being white? One attends to the relevant details, such as statistical data. One exercises one's intelligence in an effort to understand the situation via inference from the details to which one has attended. One renders judgment, answering "Yes" or "No" to the question of whether white persons qua white persons are systematically disadvantaged in the US. Then, one operates in conformity with that judgment. In this particular instance the facts of the matter render only one reasonable judgment: No, white persons are not systematically disadvantaged in the US simply for being white. Persons born into poverty and who happen to be white might be systematically disadvantaged, but that is incidental to (and in some very real senses despite) their whiteness. By contrast, if one were to pose the question "Are persons of colour systematically disadvantaged in the US simply for being persons of colour?" the answer must, again, unequivocally, be "Yes." Any other answers to these questions (such as those that invoke such nonsense ideas as "reverse racism" or "white genocide") demonstrate a failure of attentiveness, intelligence, or reason, quite possibly--one suspects probably--all three.

This is where responsibility comes in. If--contrary to fact, intelligence, and reason--I hold that white persons are systematically disadvantaged for being white, and if--contrary to fact, intelligence, and reason--I hold that persons of colour are not, then this distorts my conduct. It renders it impossible for me to intentionally conduct myself in a responsible manner in situations wherein my positions on these matters make a difference. In principle I might end up behaving responsibly, but that would be accidental, and altogether despite my failures of attentiveness, intelligence, and reason. This is all to say that the pathetic losers polluting Charlottesville with their violence are unquestionably quite irresponsible, and they are irresponsible precisely because they are irrational. In turn, they are likely irrational because they refuse to properly exercise either their intellect or their capacity to attend to details. In short, what we see in Charlottesville is not simply a collective moral failure, although we do see that, but also a collective failure of intellect and reason. The cries of the Alt-Right are the cries of the unintelligent, the irrational, and the irresponsible.

Thursday, 10 August 2017

N.T. Wright recently set off a minor dust-up in the blogosphere with the following letter to the Times:

Sir, The articles by Clare Foges (“Gender-fluid world is muddling young minds”, July 27) and Hugo Rifkind (“Social media is making gender meaningless”, Aug 1), and the letters about children wanting to be pandas (July 29), dogs or mermaids (Aug 1), show that the confusion about gender identity is a modern and now internet-fuelled, form of the ancient philosophy of Gnosticism. The Gnostic, one who “knows”, has discovered the secret of “who I really am”, behind the deceptive outward appearance (in Rifkind’s apt phrase, the “ungainly, boring, fleshly one”). This involves denying the goodness, or even the ultimate reality, of the natural world. Nature, however, tends to strike back, with the likely victims in this case being vulnerable and impressionable youngsters who, as confused adults, will pay the price for their elders’ fashionable fantasies.

The Rt Rev Prof Tom Wright

St Mary's College, St Andrews

Others have commented upon whether or not this is an appropriate use of "gnostic," or the extent to which the Rev. Prof. Wright might be misrepresenting ideas surrounding trans-identity. Those are legitimate questions, but not worth yet another blog post on the matter. What perhaps I can contribute is a distinctly Lonerganian response. Such a response is warranted because Wright in his work identifies his hermeneutics as a form of "critical realism." He more specifically identifies this critical realism as that promulgated by Ben Meyer, who in turn is very clear in identifying his critical realism with that of Bernard Lonergan. As such, insofar as Wright to some extent identifies with the Lonerganian tradition, it is reasonable to think about these comments from that tradition. And it just so happens that Lonergan was not silent on the matter of the gnostics.

For Lonergan, as I read him, the gnostic is not necessarily self-identical with the persons that ancient heresiologists described by that term, although certainly he would tend to envision them as some degree paradigmatic of the gnostic. Rather, the gnostic represents an inevitable moment in the dialectical development of human consciousness, where it has been apprehended that symbols (numbers included) can convey meanings, but the criteria by which to adjudicate the relationship between symbol and meaning have not yet been fully worked out. In other words, gnosticism represents a moment in the development of human consciousness wherein partial insights are routinely confused for complete insights. And if we are to accept that definition, then it is difficult to see how we can meaningfully describe trans-identity, whether articulated by transpersons or others, as gnostic. As such, regardless of what one makes of Lonergan's definition of "gnostic," it does seem reasonable to conclude that Wright's usage is not consistent with that found in Lonergan.

The above of course does not speak to whether what Wright says about gnostics or about trans-identity is true or not. Rather, it says that whether true or not, it is not grounded in Lonergan. I think this an important point to make, because while Wright has become virtually synonymous with "critical realism" in New Testament studies, it is worth noting that he frequently departs from the thought of Bernard Lonergan, from whom the critical realism to he claims some degree of adherence ultimately descends. The upshot then is that if one wants to understand Lonergan's critical realism, it is not sufficient to read Wright (or Meyer, or me), but one must rather read Lonergan.

Wednesday, 9 August 2017

I recently read an article by Damon Linker that argues that the real reason there are so few conservatives on campus is because the conservative notion of scholarship tends to foster a recurrent return to the same well-worn themes. He uses the example of Shakespeare: "Love in Shakespeare," "Justice in Shakespeare," etc. We can see simply comparable in New Testament studies. How many new studies of "Paul and the Law," for instance, do we need? What new can be said on the subject?

The reader at this point is probably expecting negative answers. How many new studies of "Paul and the Law" do we need? Not many. What new can be said on the subject? Not much. I'm going to defy that expectation, and say that in fact there is much more to be said, but that--and this is where we can very much see the wisdom in Linker's argument--this new work must be asking new questions. This is not simply a matter of using new methods. There is a remarkably unreflective "New Method Laundry" (to borrow a wonderful turn of phrase from Lonergan) active in biblical studies, which tends to confuse the mere act of defining and describing one's method with reflection thereupon (stating what I do is not quite the same as knowing why I do), but this is not what we're talking about. This is about asking genuinely new questions. When "Paul and the Law" is considered in New Testament studies, it is usually on the level of concept. We are asking "What does Paul mean when he refers to 'the Law'? How does he understand 'the Law'?" If we are particularly enterprising, we might ask "How does his understanding of 'the Law' relate to other Jewish or Christian writings?" We might push beyond Judaism and Christianity into the broader Greco-Roman world, and convince ourselves that we are being innovative. The above are of course all quite legitimate questions, but again, all remain within the orbit of concept.

There is an entirely different set of questions left untouched by such functional conceptualism. They operate on a level properly antecedent to concept, although in operational terms we tend to investigate them subsequently. Keeping with the example of the Law, they begin from the basic question, "What does law do for humanity?" They ask why human societies recurrently create laws. They situate the Jewish Law within that recurrent creation. They consider recurrent difficulties and challenges faced by any system of legal reasoning and practice, and how Paul might be responding to those. For instance, such queries might look at Paul's consistent tendency to play the language of law off against the language of justice (often in English rendered in terms of "justification" or "righteousness," but which have the sense of rendering or making something just), and consider how this relates to recurrent human struggles with the gap between law and justice. By such queries "Paul and the Law" begins to move from an almost-purely antiquarian pursuit of interest almost exclusively to persons whose antecedent theological commitments suppose that whatever Paul says on the matter must be normative for all persons at all times, and towards situating Paul within the great human adventure wherein disparate groups recurrently have struggled with the same sorts of dialectical conflicts.

Such questioning of course takes place. It has characterized the recent explosion, perhaps now showing signs of slowing down, of "postmodern" philosophical readings of Paul, which of course go well beyond the relatively narrow question of Paul and the Law. (With specific respect to Paul and the Law though, José Porfirio Miranda and Theodore Jennings have made some particularly insightful contributions of the sort described above, and the African-American theological tradition has produced a wealth of insights in its existentially-vital efforts to make sense of writings that were used to justify their enslavement). Yet biblical scholars have tended to shy away from asking questions of this sort within our vocation as scholars. In part this is probably because such questioning entails some solid grounding in such matters as social theory or political thought. Returning to the example of "Paul and the Law," this needs to be a grounding that not simply can say "So-and-so says X about the Law, and this relates to what Paul says about the Law," as this is still effectively conceptualism: it is the relating of one set of concepts to another. Rather, it needs to be a grounding that can render and defend competent judgments about what law does for human societies. Such competency tends to be beyond the ambit of the average biblical scholar. Such is not a critique but rather a statement of fact. The reality is that competence takes time and energy to develop, and already biblical scholars must investment much time and energy into developing the competence simply to be biblical scholars. This leaves only so much time and energy to develop competence in other areas. Where someone like Lonergan is of much value is that his investigations into knowledge provide ways by which to "streamline" the process of competence-development. Nonetheless, such competence is perhaps worth developing, as it can help move biblical studies from the ghetto of antiquarian conceptualism.

Saturday, 5 August 2017

If one looks at sites like Amazon for Method in Theology, one might likely find that they are low in stock. Of course, that is often the case with such sites (and I'm not above the cynical thought that these "only one left in stock" notices are just a ploy to get you to order now rather than wait). But in this case, they are meaningful. As some readers of this blog no doubt are already aware, later this year Method in Theology will be reissued in a new edition. This long-awaited new edition will constitute a significant moment in the history of Lonergan studies. In 1985, the year after Lonergan's passing, the Lonergan Research Institute in Toronto was founded, with a mission to preserve, promote, develop, and implement the work of Bernard Lonergan. With that mission in mind, the Institute undertook the herculean task of editing and publishing the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (CWL). The aim of the CWL was to publish definitive editions of all of Lonergan's published and (at that time) unpublished work. In some cases this required that his Latin writings, produced while teaching at the Gregorian, be translated into English, and both the original and the translation made available. When complete in (hopefully) 2020, the series will contain twenty-five volumes, of which Method will be the twenty-third to be published (although actually volume 14 in the series). The CWL edition of Insight (also known as the 5th edition) appeared relatively early, in 1992. But a decision was made that Method in Theology--Lonergan's best-known work, alongside Insight--should be scheduled for a later date. A slightly altered printing of the existing second edition of Method appeared in 1990: Lonergan's preface was moved from page ix to x, and an errata was added on p. 406. But the CWL edition of Method in Theology constitutes a far more extensive revision, which not only incorporates such errata into the body of the text but will add appendices that will help readers to more fully grasp what Lonergan is doing in this work.

This new edition is currently at the press, and should be available this fall (I've heard October as a more precise date, but I'm not entirely sure how accurate that is). This has had a slightly chilling effect on my own work, insofar as I am avoiding any citation of Method in any of my writing until I can cite the new edition. But that's all right. There are far worse problems in life than waiting for a new and improved version of what one is working upon.

Tuesday, 1 August 2017

Not infrequently I have described my interest in the dates at which the New Testament texts were composed as the expression of a neurotic compulsion. There is probably some truth to that, perhaps even much truth. Indeed, sometimes when I labour upon the minutiae of the data I can feel Leo Strauss' words against "pain-loving antiquarianism" rattling around in my head. But the truth is that there is more than just neurosis going on, and that precisely because--despite my ironic self-deprecation (a Canadian vice that personally I think makes us quite endearing)--I am in fact driven by more than an antiquarian impulse. As I reflect upon my own work, I increasingly realize that at the heart of my scholarly endeavours is an effort to overcome what I have in print described as the "rupture hypothesis," i.e. the hypothesis that between Second Temple Judaism and the church stands an unbridgeable chasm. Actually, there are in this hypothesis two chasms, two ruptures, such that it should perhaps be better described as the hypothesis of double rupture. The first rupture is typically situated somewhere between Judaism and Jesus (Jesus himself is often identified as the party responsible, although sometimes the Baptist comes under indictment), the second somewhere between Jesus and the church (here Paul is often trotted into the dock). Within biblical studies, these ruptures are conceptualized in various ways, all of which tend in their turn to reveal unhealed biases. Sometimes these ruptures are conceptualized in terms of a contradiction between Jewish law and Christian grace (here we confront lingering but theologically and empirically dubious suspicions that anyone who thinks legally cannot experience divine favour, and that if such a person does experience divine favour such a person will ipso facto cease and desist their legal thinking); other times it is conceptualized in terms of a contradiction between Semitic monotheism and Hellenistic theology (here we confront pernicious yet facile narratives about the Hellenization of Christianity); still other times it is conceptualized in terms of a contradiction between spontaneous charisma and sterile institution (here we confront a whole series of hard-to-kill suppositions regarding the incompatibility of spirituality and routine). But ultimately the identification of such conceptions and generally-correlated biases is not what overturns the rupture hypothesis, no matter how salutary such identification might be. Rather, what overturns the rupture hypothesis is the relevant data. And the relevant data puts to the lie this hypothesis of the double rupture. Quite simply, the data clearly demonstrates that Jesus and his followers were fully grounded in Judaism, and it equally demonstrates that the church is fully a consequence of the operations carried out by Jesus and his first followers. Modern historiography can finally apprehend this dual reality because modern historiography has developed the capacity to conceptualize change with continuity ("continuity with change" being what I would consider to be a succinct definition of development).

So, how does chronology relate to this? I would argue that a lower chronology (i.e. one that tends to date the New Testament texts earlier than the consensus dates) bridges the putative ruptures more readily than any other. The earlier that the earliest extant Christian texts were written, the more plausible it is to identify them as fully Jewish. At the same time, the earlier that the earliest extant Christian texts were written, then the earlier that we can situate the specifically Christian developments evident therein. Put more synthetically: insofar as the most foundational Christian developments occurred while Christianity was most fully within the bosom of Judaism, we are able to more fully and clearly conceive the relationship between Judaism and Christianity as one that entails continuity with change. Of course, this is not an argument for a lower chronology. Such an argument can only be advanced by diligently--in a pain-staking if not pain-loving fashion--sifting through the relevant data. But if such an empirical argument grounded in the data is advanced, and if we judge said argument to be a reasonable hypothesis, and if we find that as a consequence we can more readily build a narrative that more fully appreciates the simultaneously Jewish and Christian character of these texts and the persons responsible for their creation, then barring biases that distort our understanding we should in fact be quite happy to welcome the consequent advance in our knowledge.

N.B. No, the early Christians probably did not regularly describe themselves as "Christians" during that era. Certainly, if they did, that self-description seems to have registered little in our extant data (although one must be wary of the naive supposition that the term could not have been current prior to its first extant use, a supposition that fundamentally seems to confuse knowing with looking). But in any case, as I am not talking about their own self-definition but rather our retrospective understanding of their development, this is a matter which simply does not matter. The decision to refer heuristically to these persons as "Christians" is quite different from and in no way implies the judgment that they referred to themselves as such.

As I have spoken about before in this space, I have the
honour of being involved in the development of the International Institute for
Method in Theology. It is the next logical step in working out Lonergan’s
legacy. Since 1985, much energy in the field of Lonergan studies has been
directed at editing and publishing his collected works. This project should be completed by the end of 2020, when the twenty-fifth and final volume in the collection is published. With this project coming to
an end, it is time for Lonergan scholarship to turn its attention more fully to
the work of promoting, developing, and implementing Lonergan’s thought. The
IIMT constitutes a network of institutions and scholars that are working
together towards this aim, and indeed towards the broader aim of thinking
theologically about a host of contemporary issues (wherein “contemporary”
should be taken to include the contemporary study of ancient texts and peoples.
And not just biblical texts and the peoples who produced them: although of course they will always occupy a particular pride of place in the work of Christian theology, in principle the lives and thought of all ancient peoples can provide theological insight). At present, the IIMT’s sponsoring
agencies consist of the Lonergan Project at Marquette University, the Lonergan
Research Institute of Regis College in the University of Toronto, and the
Gregorian University in Rome. The scope of this work however is truly
international, including scholars from geographically as far from North America
and Europe as Australia. It truly is an honour to be labouring in such august
company.

Robert Doran--Emmett Doerr Chair of Catholic Systematic Theology at Marquette University, General
Editor of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, and author of (among other
works) the really quite remarkable Theology and the Dialectics of History--is integral to this initiative, as he has been to the preservation, promotion, development, and implementation of Lonergan's thought for the better part of half a century. He has graciously made available online the transcript of a talk that he gave back in March, "The International Institute for Method in Theology: A Vision." It provides a wealth of material not only on this initiative, but on the institutional history of Lonergan studies. Definitely worth a read.

About Me

I was born and raised in London--not the real one but rather the one in Ontario, Canada. I took a B.A. in Anthropology at the University of Western Ontario (now Western University) and then a M.A. and Ph.D. in Religious Studies at McMaster University. I am the author of two books: Aposynagōgos and the Historical Jesus in John: Rethinking the Johannine Expulsion Passages (Brill, 2013), and The Quest for the Historical Jesus after the Demise of Authenticity: Towards a Critical-Realist Philosophy of History in Jesus Studies (T&T Clark, 2016). I am currently working on my third monograph, which aims to return to and evaluate the arguments advanced by John A.T. Robinson in his 1976 work, Redating the New Testament.